meta

One thing Nathan and John have been working on under the hood of the Creative Commons Network over the last couple of months is a promotional code system which gives us (and you) more flexibility when purchasing account subscriptions.

I’ve spent the last few months of Summer volunteering for Creative Commons, and in that time I’ve had a great opportunity to do a few little things that should make CC outreach and communication a little bit more effective.

First, I’ve been working a lot on the Videos section of the site, dealing specifically with promotional and informational CC videos. I’ve reorganized the Videos page on the Creative Commons wiki, finally putting together all the source assets and translation information in one place. That page may change a bit more in the coming weeks, but already it’s a lot clearer and easier for people who want to engage with the videos.

In addition to the wiki page, I’ve added a few links and a bit more information to the individual video pages on the main site. We hope that now the translation materials and source assets are displayed more prominently, people who are inspired will be enabled to jump in and translate or remix or mash up the videos.

The other major project I’ve been tackling this summer is adding “tags” to the CC weblog posts. As you’ll notice on the right of the main Commons News page, our most popular tags are visible are now visible, and each individual post has tags at the bottom of it, which you can click on for more posts tagged in the same way. For example, check out the Free Music Archive tag which displays all the posts related to WFMU’s Free Music Archive project. I’ve tagged a full year of CC posts and we will continue this habit going forward. This should make it easier to find things that we’ve blogged about that are especially relevant to your interests, as well as track related stories more efficiently.

These are just a few little projects I’ve had the pleasure of tackling as a CC volunteer. I hope it makes it easier for everybody to find their way around the site!

What happens if someone sells your tweet on a t-shirt? Or when CNN puts it on their 24 hours news network? These question may initially appear ridiculous, but when authors are penning entire books through their microblogs these are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Join us for a mostly serious look at the implications raised by reuse, syndication and commercial exploitation of microcontent.

Hard drives fail, DVDs crack, and jump drives get lost. We can store our data in the cloud, but AOL just deleted Geocities and now Kodak is threatening to remove your albums if you don’t pay them. Sites like Archive.org and Google’s cache represent a partial solution to the problem, but how do we encourage the preservation of a permanent web? What are the laws and ethical issues involved with archiving other people’s content?

Hear from industry experts and lawyers who have crafted the terms for sites you use everyday so that the next time you meet with counsel, you’ll be a little more prepared and won’t accidentally trigger a user insurrection.

If you have a minute, go and take a moment to go and vote the panels — your support will make a difference. Thanks!

If you’re one of the couple dozen people who copied text off our blog yesterday, you may have noticed some more text accompany your clipboard when you pasted it — a link to our site and the license (Attribution) we’ve offered our content under. This is because we’ve installed Tynt’sTracer tool on our blog which uses a bit of javascript wizardry to concatenate attribution and, as of now, particular CC license information to content copied from our site.

If you’re curious about how this works, try selecting some text from anywhere on our blog and pasting it somewhere. Rich text editors (such as most WYSIWYG HTML editors, or Gmail) will preserve the hyperlink but the text will also show up in standard plain text editors as well.

As a creator and contributor to the commons, you have the right to attribution (all six of our licenses require it), so why not make it easy for your audience to automatically provide it?

Setting up and installing Tracer on your own site is easy, just head over to the site, create an account for your domain, select the CC license you’ve released your work under, and add the javascript tags to the footer of your pages. You’ll then be able to see on your Tracer dashboard precisely which text and images are being copied and pasted from your site, and where they are going.

And don’t worry, the extra markup is just text. Nothing about Tynt’s tool forces reusers to do anything, its merely useful additional information providing proper attribution and license notification.

The wiki is designed to get you involved and collaborating with us; anyone with an account or an OpenID can login and add to certain pages. If you’re a member of the CC Network, your profile acts as an OpenID. Not yet a member? Support the work of Creative Commons and join the CC Network today to get an OpenID!

We need your contributions to continue developing this wiki into a valuable community resource, so check out the Getting Started page and jump right in!

We just turned on the first big creativecommons.org site design changes since October 2007. If you’re reading in a feedreader and haven’t visited the main CC site in awhile, here’s a home page screenshot:

The blog (which of course you’re reading now) no longer dominates. Of course headlines from the main CC blog and from jurisdiction projects are still present on the home page, and you can always visit the main blog page or planet for the full blog experience.

Previously we made the CC wiki match the main site’s theme as closely as possible. That was a good idea at the time, but now that the world is more familiar with wikis, we’ve brought wiki tools and navigation to the fore. Here’s a screenshot of wiki navigation for a logged in user:

We’ve also made some incremental improvements to license deeds, consolidating important items that aren’t top level license properties under a “With the understanding that:” heading, see screenshot below:

Last week we mentioned that you can follow short updates from Creative Commons on the microblogging services twitter and identi.ca.

Identi.ca has a feature allowing you to view (or subscribe via a feed) all microbloggers a particular account subscribes to. So we’ve made the CC identi.ca account subscribe to the microblogs of CC jurisdiction project leads, staff, board members, and interns, creating a microblog version of the Planet Creative Commons blog aggregator.